St. Paul, MN = Small Town, USA
Warning Note: The following statements regarding my opinion of St. Paul are serious...they are actually not sarcastic! So I don't want any locals sending me angry emails about me making fun of their city - I am being serious!!This is what I love about St. Paul - despite the fact that it has a population of nearly 280,000 people, and is part of a great metropolitan area that (including Minneapolis on the "wrong" side of the river) nears a population of 1 million, it is still very much "Small Town, USA."
This isn't new news to me - I have seen this evidenced many, many times by the small town connections that I see between people when I'm out at bars, restaurants or the grocery store. Don't ever go into a small, hole-in-the-wall bar with someone who grew up there - if you want to talk to them at all that night. Because they will know EVERY SINGLE PERSON THERE...and somehow not have seen them for 5 years. I love it though - because that's the type of town I grew up in. Only our population was about 1/80 that of St. Paul.
But here is the best evidence that St. Paul is small-town...it makes the local news when the national news shows up to report on something here. This is a metropolitan area with major league sports, traveling Broadway shows and giant Snoopy statues all over. (That last fact has nothing to do with anything, I just think that my non-Minnesotan readers should know that.) But this morning, the Today show was here doing live remotes about St. Paul's participation in the Habitat For Humanity project that sent new houses down the Mississippi to New Orleans. It was one of the leading stories on tonight's news.
One more note on the Habitat For Humanity project locally - the great thing about what they did in St. Paul is that they not only built houses to send down the river, but they kept two of the houses locally. This is effective in bringing attention to the fact that we still need to remember people in our own communities that need help, even though we all want to help everyone in the gulf region (with good reason!), also.
Way to go, St. Paul!
posted by Steph @ 4:14 PM
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